LaRouche Addresses Youth Cadre School:
The Political Economy of Creativity
Lyndon LaRouche addressed a cadre school of the Ibero-American LaRouche Youth Movement based in Argentina on July 28, with audiences also in Mexico City, in Bogotá, Colombia, and Loudoun County, Virginia. Here are his opening remarks.
Now, the remarks I'm going to make today, come under a general scientific topic: It's called "The Political Economy of Creativity." But in a special chapter in that ongoing account of this matter, today, the subject could be called "Bad Times," which has the ironical significance—if you could see this—of the Business section of the New York Times, today. And the New York Times, which belatedly acknowledges the fact that there was a major crisis in the financial markets this past week, blames it on China, and says, "five months after stock markets around the world were shaken by a 9% plunge in the value of the Chinese stocks, the markets again have come under severe pressure."
It has nothing to do with China. But they like to blame it on China.
The nature of the problem is this: Looking at the situation internationally, what we're looking at, is the process of the end-phase of disintegration of the present world financial-monetary system. The events of the past week on this account, internationally, were based on a breakdown of the aspect of the system which is called the hedge fund operations.
Now, the problem was this: The world is dominated by various kinds of peculiar types of financial enterprises. Hedge funds typify this. Hedge funds are a sort of gambling; it's sort of Monte Carlo or Las Vegas carried on as a substitute for economics.
Now, the basis of this system, is going to banks and other resources, which presumably are sources of financial money, financial assets, and agreeing to borrow the use of those financial assets, which are then used to purchase something, again, on options! So that when they buy up a company, by stealing it in a sense, by roughneck methods: They buy up a company, a large concern, they don't pay for it; they pay for it with a promise to pay for it. The promise to pay for it, depends upon the delivery of the money which had been promised by things like U.S. banks—major U.S. banks and other institutions. And the stock market, like the Wall Street stock market, plays a role in this. Now, the fact of the matter is, that the rate of growth of hedge funds and similar types of takeovers, in the world markets—notably in the United States, Europe, and so forth and so on—the rate of takeover is depending upon a growth in the rate of takeover.
Now, the growth of takeovers has proceeded, while the actual growth of the physical economy has been collapsing. As everybody knows in South America, as well as in the United States: The real economy has been collapsing. The physical standard of living of the typical American in the lower 80% of family-income brackets, has been collapsing since 1977. There has never been an abatement in the general trend of collapse of the living standards and related conditions of the lower 80% of family-income brackets in the United States.
Prosperity, insofar as it's perceived, has been shared only among the upper 20% of family-income brackets, and that has been shrinking—that is, the standard of living of the upper 20% of family-income brackets has been overall shrinking in the lower brackets. The wealth has been concentrated in the upper 3% of family-income brackets, and that's pretty much an international trend. You see the same thing in Asia, where the poor are more desperately poor in many cases than they ever were before, including in nations which have an aspect of prosperity in a certain limited part of their total economy.
Now, so therefore, you have a collapsing world economy, in terms of physical measurements—standard of living; one of the biggest speculations, particularly during the 1990s, which is a complete fraud: There has been no improvement in the economy, no gain in the economy, in the United States or Europe, since the beginning of the 1990s. It's been collapsing all the way along. But there has been the aspect of prosperity, in terms of financial accounts, as opposed to physical, real accounts. The physical standard of living has been collapsing, but the financial obligations have been increasing, and some of the financial incomes—certain portions—have been nominally increasing, but also under conditions of high rates, and accelerating rates, of financial inflation. So therefore, a dollar is worth much less, each year, in the United States. And the rate of depreciation of the dollar, as the dollar, in terms of physical purchasing power, has increased; that is, the rate of inflation has increased.
Ground Zero
So, now you come to a point where the whole world market depends upon speculation, in these kinds of takeovers, takeovers which involve a shrinking and collapse of the economy! Takeovers, like the housing bubble here, in Loudoun County. Loudoun County is Ground Zero for the collapse of the world financial-monetary system. Loudoun County has no usefulness. It once did have usefulness, about 20-odd years ago. But somebody decided to have prosperity; and prosperity consisted of housing. No industry, virtually no farming, no production. The costs of maintaining the county, per capita, per square kilometer, increased. The amount of housing increased. But there was no income generated within the county. That is, no real income, just the financial wages people were getting.
Now, this thing has inflated. We're talking about $700,000 to $1 million for a virtual shack, that in former times you'd be ashamed of being caught dead with. And what this has become, is, from West Virginia to Washington, D.C., along this track in Northern Virginia—and the same thing is happening in Maryland, with less acute manifestations—what you have is a gigantic bedroom. And people are commuting morning and evening each way, an hour and a half to two hours, from West Virginia, to get to the Washington vicinity where they work. And what they pass through to get there, is a gigantic, permanent traffic jam. We're going to have more areas covered by highways, than we're going to have housing pretty soon, at this rate. In order to accommodate this vast commuter traffic, you increase the number of lanes in the highway; you increase the number of superhighways. To pay for this, you have high taxes, in the form of tolls, at toll booths, and things of that sort, which are escalating.
So you have people moving up to two hours a day, each way, in many cases, from this area, to work in the Washington area, where they're employed usually at useless things, like financial services, and selling real estate and things like that—part of the parasite factor. So you build up a tremendous expense to maintain living conditions for a population moving into these areas such as Loudoun County. But no income is actually generated in Loudoun County. Income is brought into Loudoun County in the form of income of people who work elsewhere. And you have some retail stores' sales income and so forth, which is a part of this process.
So, you have this whole area moving. You're building up the transportation system for commuting, at great cost, to get into the Washington area where the salaries or pay to work emanates from that area. Now, what happens, when a $700,000 shack, which is a fairly common little, cheap house out here nowadays: When the people in the shack are no longer able to maintain the income necessary to pay for the mortgage on that shack, you begin to get, in Loudoun County—you get this throughout London, you get this on the continent of Europe, you get this in Spain and so forth—you get suddenly, worldwide, the rate of growth of real estate speculation for this kind of insanity, of which this area is only typical; you have an ascent in that rate of growth, and it reaches the point that the actual world income, in net effect, physically, is collapsing! Especially in Europe and the Americas, the net income per capita has been collapsing, as industry is shut down, as agriculture is shut down, and as you begin to import food and products from other parts of the world where the labor is cheaper.
And that doesn't mean that we can't compete with China or India. That means that people in China and India have to starve in large numbers in order to make some of them look prosperous. There's 70-80% of the population of Asia, in so-called growth areas, where cheap labor is providing the stuff consumed in Europe and the Americas. And yet, 70-80% of the population is worse off than it was before. And the only way that these countries are able to supply these cheap goods to the United States, Europe, and so forth, is by starving their people.
And we are starving here: We don't have industries. We are not growing our own food! We don't have food security in the United States. We don't have power security in the United States. We don't have drinkable water security in the United States! It's all this crazy fiction.
Now, in the meantime, the amount of money counted for this, the amount of money being printed in various ways, fictitious ways, is increasing. And this is a world phenomenon. The amount of product, as measured in physical terms per capita and per square kilometer, in the Americas and in Europe, is collapsing, through this outsourcing operation. And money is being printed in various ways, including completely fictitious money, by electronic means, in order to keep this thing going. So now, you've got to a point where the growth in net effect, represented by this expansion of this type, is growing more rapidly than anything else. In fact, the real economy is shrinking.
The way this works is by multiplying the debt, by various fictitious methods of inflation, of printing money electronically in the form of speculation. So you have this mass of investment, which, to survive, has to grab and suck the blood of economies. And the economy which is getting sucked in that way, is actually collapsing.
A Bush League Economy
Now, what was the key thing here, the most notable thing, has been the collapse of the mortgage-based securities system: What happened is, the real estate speculation and the housing, as in this area, was done as a fraud. It was done for the purpose of building up assets in the form of mortgages against people, by putting up houses, and moving them into cheap jobs in an area like this. The housing increased. The price of the housing increased. It looked like a rising market. The homeowner said, "Ah! My house is worth more on the market today than when I bought it." And therefore, the system goes on. And this housing bubble is part of the process of generating the nominal capital which goes into buying up corporations internationally, which then are eaten up and shut down, the way the automobile industry was eaten up and shut down in the United States in the year 2005-2006.
So, we're destroying—for example, we destroyed the state of Michigan; we destroyed the state of Ohio; we partly destroyed the state of Indiana. It's owned by this swindle, which the Congress condoned; the Democratic Party condoned. So, now the world economy is collapsing: It's being shrunk by the very methods by which the nominal financial assets have been increased.
The banks no longer really have assets to supply the credit to the speculators to buy up corporations around the world. And the point was reached in the recent time, where what happened was this: In the last wave of speculation internationally, we went into a wave of takeovers—takeovers of the corporations around the world. The takeovers were accomplished without actually paying for the takeover, but by delivering a promise to pay, and using that to grab a corporation that they were going to loot. But they never paid the money. They only promised to pay it. Their promise to pay, depended on the other end on a promise to deliver that money to the speculator, from places like the banks around here, the major banks. And the banks didn't have the money.
So now, you've had a chain-reaction collapse starting, of the whole system.
Now, if you look at the figures, as I look at the figures, the total figures on this, what you're looking at is the end and disintegration of the present world monetary-financial system. And it's happening now. It's not happening because of a drop of 9% of the income for China. It's dropping because of Bush factors: We have a Bush league economy, that can not be sustained.
Now, behind this is something else: How were we so stupid, in the United States and Europe, and other countries, in order to do this? And this has been going on since 1968, since 1971. And it was the Baby-Boomers that did it! How'd they do it? Look at the 68er philosophy. What were the 68ers in Europe? What was their philosophy? What was the philosophy of the 68ers in the United States? Look at it. The majority of them, the hegemonic section of the 68er phenomenon, was environmentalist. They were anti-industry, anti-farmer, anti-production, anti-science. They became, by 1970, the environmentalist movement, which has destroyed the world economy. They became people like that possum-bred guy, Al Gore. And therefore, the Baby-Boomers said, "Shut down nuclear power! Shut down agriculture! Shut down industry! Shut down production! And give up those ways of making money which involve science and technology." "Get rid of the farmers. Prevent mass production of food, destroy the farm system. Destroy industry. Destroy modern kinds of power."
So, we've had a physical decline of the economy, which has been engineered, by the Baby-Boomers. The thing was done by the Baby-Boomers, or 68ers, in the 1970s. It was done under Nixon; it was done under Carter. It was continued under Ronald Reagan. It was accelerated under Bush I. It was accelerated under Clinton. It was really accelerated to a destructive degree under Bush II. And all this time, this process has been going on.
So, you have two factors: You have the factor of an insane system, as contrasted with what the world economy was before 1968. An insane system—but you also have a mentality which has been driving this system to its present extreme. That mentality is represented chiefly by people in positions of power, who are between the ages of 50 and 65 years: the Baby-Boomer generation.
Now, the phenomenon is, not everybody between the ages of 50 and 65 is clinically insane. But the culture to which they submit is insane. Take the case of the U.S. Congress. Many people in the Congress, are, as individuals, quite sane. They're intelligent, they're creative, they represent a higher standard of culture, generally, than the average part of the population. And they are, in large degree, truly qualified as representatives of the people. But they're also insane. They're insane, why? Because they don't make decisions on the basis of reason, of independent reason: They don't exercise judgment. They say, "I have to go along. We have to go along." They are insane by virtue of participation in a consensus. A consensus, which is a Baby-Boomer consensus, which is anti-technology and is anti-science. It's anti-reason, in point of fact.
And the typification is Gore. Gore is not the cause of the problem, Gore is the typification of the problem. Being part possum, you can't blame him entirely for this thing. But Gore says, "Carbon! Carbon!" What does that mean? You're going to shut down human life. It's the worst form of environmentalism ever conceived. It's worse than the Luddites. It's clinically insane: A society which allows Al Gore to lead it, is a society which is doomed to its own early extinction. And the fact that this thing is tolerated; that this guy is not put in the loony bin immediately, and the people who support him aren't put into mental health-care, immediately, indicates the society is on the road to its own self-destruction.
Unless it changes.
Creativity vs. Cybernetics
Now, this is where we come back to creativity: I've had a long affair with creativity. It started back when I was a teenager, and I rejected Euclidean geometry, and rejected it then, and I've rejected it ever since, because it's insane. It does not correspond to reason. And people who believe in Euclidean geometry, who accept this swill, are mentally damaged. And this has been characteristic of much science: The influence of Euclid, or belief in Euclid, or similar things in society, is responsible for much mass insanity, and much of the lunacy that happens in society today.
I never believed in that; I was opposed to it. And in my opposition, I became interested in creativity. Especially after I returned from military service, and became occupied with the question of the definition of life, as opposed to a mechanistic definition of life. And then, when I ran into, in January of 1948, a pre-publication edition of Norbert Wiener's book on cybernetics, I realized I was looking at the face of the enemy right in that book, or in the doctrine included in that book: that everything could be explained in terms of mechanistic, mathematical formulations. Then, I found a guy who was even more insane than Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, who is really insane; who said he could eliminate the human species by inventing machines that could now become "creative," through cybernetics, that you could replace human beings. You had, for example, people in California, in the famous industry out there, in Silicon Valley: These people are constantly fascinated with the idea of replacing the human mind with a machine. And that's around the world.
Now, this thinking comes from the denial of creativity, and it comes from precisely the most ancient evil we've known in European civilization: That most ancient evil is the Olympian Zeus, who said that Prometheus had to be tortured—for what? For allowing human beings to know what creativity is, in this case, to know the use of fire. This is the oligarchical tradition. This is the tradition which we know in European civilization as the history of imperialism. This is what was done to destroy Greece, by the Sophist movement. This is what led into the Peloponnesian War which was part of the destruction of Greece, Greek culture. This is the Roman Empire; this is the Byzantine Empire; this is the system of chivalry under Venetian banker control. This is the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system, as designed by the doctrines of Paolo Sarpi, which is the British System.
The argument is, that we can not allow human beings, as individuals, to be treated as human beings. They must do as they're told. A few masters, who are the oligarchs, will tell them what to think and what to do. The work they get will be assigned to them by oligarchs. They will not be creative. They will not discover the secret of fire—i.e., nuclear power. And nuclear power was destroyed largely in the United States by the Baby-Boomer influence on this issue: to destroy creativity, to produce a kind of man in the image of the Dionysian cult! Which is what you see with the Baby-Boomers, the 68ers: It's a Dionysian cult, in that tradition.
So, the problem we have, is that the culture is so saturated with this kind of ideology, and this history, and its effect, particularly since the postwar period, since the 68ers emerged, that it's very difficult for people to see a way, an actual way, of enabling civilization to survive, in a now presently onrushing, general disintegration of the world monetary-financial economic system. The average person, the average person of influence, leading politicians, leading figures of all types in society who are the pacesetters of policy-making, are all intrinsically incompetent in facing this issue.
Now, this is not exactly an unusual situation in human history, in modern European history in particular, and ancient European history. It has always been a very tiny minority of the population, which has had a practical understanding, as well as a theoretical understanding, of creativity. A very tiny portion, like you. Hmm? Like you. Who actually works at mastering creativity. As opposed to being the ordinary animal, which is what most people are condemned to being. Because they think like cows: They bring us "Bad Times."
They teach us to have a "consensus"! Why should you support global warming? 'Cause that's the Consensus! We all agree!
"What about the scientists?"
Forget them! The Consensus says, no.
So, it always has been, in every case, especially the cases we've studied historically from Europe beginning with Classical Greece, with the Pythagoreans and Plato, that this understanding of creativity, has always been adopted only by a very small minority of the total population. And the rest of the population has gone along with it for a time. But the rest of the population, being stupefied into this bestiality, lacking the habits of creativity which distinguish a man from a beast, will be panicked into destroying the leaders and destroying the institutions which saved society and enabled it to go up.
Which has happened here. Roosevelt was an example of creativity, an organized creativity, who saved this planet from Hitler. Without him, he would not have been stopped. Hitler would not have been stopped. And the minute he was dead, Truman and company moved the society backward again, to the non-creative form of society, from the creative form. And that's how we got into this mess.
So therefore, the question and the issue here, is, we're still in this situation. We do not have an intelligent population. We don't. We don't have populations who have a conscious understanding of the difference between them and an animal. They don't know what creativity is. And the only way that you can get the kind of leadership you need in society, even of a tiny minority, who will lead the majority of the population to its own safety, is to develop a group of people who actually understand what creativity is.
The Science of Art
Now, we have had, in the United States, and to some degree also in Europe, similarly, we've had an experiment of sorts, which has not achieved its acme yet, but it has demonstrated a principle. And the principle is, to attack the enemies of creativity in their most significant expression: Those who think that physical science is mathematics off on this side, and that Classical art is something completely different, off on this side. And the characteristic unification of this, is to recognize that the problem of this dichotomy, of physical science from human knowledge, the science of art, is rooted in the idea, as I've emphasized recently, in a recent writing, that, on one side, science is associated with a priori conceptions of the organ of sight. We're a sight-organized society; Euclidean geometry is sight-organized society: straight lines of vision.
On the other hand, the other side of the same phenomenon, is sound, hearing. And it's only to the extent that you recognize that sight is one way of looking at something, as instrumentation, and sound is a different way of looking at the same phenomenon, as instrumentation. And sight and sound are not independent authorities! They're fallacious! Like every instrument. It's only by the human mind's ability, to take the paradox, especially the paradox of sight and sound. Sound can focus on an object. Hmm? You can know an object by its sound. You can know an object by sight. But neither is true. And in human beings, the way this is reflected, is in the Classical, especially the bel canto, approach to music, to the singing voice.
Therefore, if you combine your experience of the bel canto conception of the universe, which the singing voice, properly trained, as Bach's method provides the method to do that, and you say, "Here is the universe," as Kepler said, "Here's the universe. Here's the Solar System"; it has harmonic characteristics which correspond to the faculty of sound, of hearing. On the other hand, the universe also has the characteristics of vision. But, as Kepler demonstrated in the generalization of a law of gravity, neither is true. You have to combine the two, to get a different faculty than either sight or hearing; you have to combine the two, to find a faculty of the mind.
We do the same thing in physical science, when we work competently. What do we do? We create instruments, particularly when we're trying to explore the microscopic world: We create instruments that sight can not find, instruments that sound can not reach, and we treat these instruments, or synthetic instruments, if you want to call them that, [as a sense organ], with which we explore the microphysical domain; instruments which we use to understand the universe at large, when sight will not tell us what's going on out there. Like a phenomenon, like the case of the Crab Nebula: You can get many views of the Crab Nebula: Which one is true? There are many different views, depending on the instrumentation you use. Well, obviously, they're all true. But they're all false. Because it's the irony, the contradictions, the paradoxes among them, which point you in the direction of the truth.
Discovery in science is what? It's always creating new instrumentation, or new use of instrumentation, to reach beyond the bounds of simply direct naked sight and sound. And smell, as well. (We use that smell; we use it for detecting certain politicians.)
But you need these instruments, and you create an ironical juxtaposition, of instrumentation of what you're observing. Now the human mind must take these paradoxes and bring them together, and create a sense organ, a synthetic sense organ of the mind—not of the senses, but of the mind. And we use the way we use sight and vision, in paradoxical relationship for ordinary observation, to do this.
Now, what happens then, is you discover there are principles, which you can neither see, nor hear. When you found a principle, you found something you can neither see, nor hear. Because sight is fallacious. Vision is fallacious. It's paradoxical. Sound, simply said, is fallacious.
Now, you need a discernment which is neither, but which reconciles both, as Kepler did with his organization of the Solar System. And this is the mind. Now, this object, therefore, that you see is the truth, as opposed to the object of sight or hearing—the truth! Which lies beyond the mere sense faculties. The truth is—what's its dimensionality? It has a dimensionality of all the kinds of instrumentation by which you determine the object. At the same time, it has no dimensionality, because it's a rate of change in the universe. It's a rate of boundless change, in and of itself. It's an infinitesimal.
The Infinitesimal in Music
Now, in discovery, if you have the experience of a scientific discovery, or if you have the experience of how you transform a performance of a composition into its composer's intention, as opposed to simply singing the notes, this object also is an infinitesimal. How does it occur? It occurs in music, for example, in a very slight modification of the way you do a transition. It's very slight. But if it's done effectively, it's very powerful.
Some of you have been working with the Ave Verum Corpus, in which you have a couple of points with these successive Lydians. Except in the final phase, you get this very sharp transformation of the meaning of the entire composition—if you do it properly. It's an infinitesimal. How do you put it on the score? You don't put it on the score! You keep working at it, until you've done it. And when you hear it, you recognize it! At first you don't know what it is. You're just taken by surprise. You have the sense that the composition is completed. What happened? Something happened. What happened? Just a moment before—what happened? What was that? What was that whisper that moved through the room? That is the meaning of the entire composition.
So therefore, these two kinds of things, this kind of experience, is the experience of creativity. And the person who understands what creativity is, is always searching for that experience.
Why are you searching? You're searching, because you know with certainty, that what you think you know from simple sense-perception is not the truth. You're trying to find the truth, and just like some of our people working on the question of motive, in the case of Gauss's work on the orbit of Ceres in the Solar System—you're looking for that "thing," that experience, which makes the difference. You're looking for, what is it? The motive. The idiot will say, "Well, in the orbit, I've got the mathematical calculation of the orbit. I've got the geometric construction of the orbit. Here's the way it looks, here's the solution." Bunk!
What you have is the shadow of the solution. But what's the solution?
What moved it?! The mathematical formula did not move that planetoid. It wasn't the mathematical formula that moved it. It wasn't the formula for the orbit of the Earth, that moved the Earth along its trajectory. It was that something moved it! What moved it was a principle, an infinitesimal. Which, because it's constantly changing, is not subject to interpretation by quadrature. It's like that.
And you see all the greatest minds in science; typical in modern science, Nicholas of Cusa was the first to raise this question explicitly in modern science. It's already there in the Pythagoreans, in their work, especially in the example of the doubling of the cube, as by Archytas. Each of these cases is an infinitesimal: It's an action, a powerful action, which envelops the entire universe as to its type, but which is so small in its incidence of action, that it's infinitesimal. It's infinite in its totality, but it's infinitesimal in its immediate expression in any local situation.
And this same thing is true in great poetry, Classical poetry, in drama.
The Case of Hamlet
Let's take the case of Hamlet: Now, most people who think they've studied Shakespeare don't know what the hell they're talking about—especially the experts. They know nothing about that drama. There is no hero in Classical tragedy, none. There's no hero. You can't say, that, "if Hamlet had only done this, he might have survived," or something that I looked up. Bunk! The point of tragedy—all the great tragedians, which defines them as Classical, in the sense of Classical art—is they don't believe that a rotten society, a person working in a rotten society, can, in terms of membership in that society, find a solution for the self-destruction of that society. Can't.
The solution lies in creativity, in going outside that society, to break its rules. Within the rules that people obey, the consensus of the people in that society, there's not a decent character, in the main flow of the plot of Hamlet; or of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. There is no "good guy" there, who's actually among the main actors. You have figures, who act as commentators, who help you to see what the problem is. But the characters on stage, as in Wallenstein, there is no solution! And there was no solution! Inside the framework—there was none! The society was destroying itself! The culture was destroying itself! The people who participated, were all destroying themselves. They had no solution, no capability. The solution lay outside. And after Wallenstein was dead, a long time after he was dead, then you had a solution, coming from the outside, in the intervention of the Cardinal [Mazarin], and in the development of what became, for a period of time, the great civilization of France, under Jean-Baptiste Colbert's leadership: The birth of modern science, in its organized form, came then.
The solution is always going outside the attributable motive of the existing society. Outside the consensus, outside what everybody thinks. There is nobody with the solution, within the consensus. It's only outside the consensus, that a solution exists. And no faction within the consensus has a solution.
That's the case now: Here, in the United States, and in the world as a whole. There is no solution for this! The United States is doomed! As long as the people who are presently running it are able to control the way the decisions are made! You see that acted every day in terms of the U.S. Congress: The U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives—these guys, just can't get out of bed! They're the Oblomovs of the American legislative process. They just can't get themselves out of bed, even to survive, hmm? Any Russian can explain that to you. They probably would love to explain it to you—get a certain schadenfroh out of this thing.
But it's going outside the rules of the game as they are accepted now. Because it is the rules of the game, it is the consensus, that causes a true national tragedy, a true cultural tragedy. And it's only those of us who go outside the limits of generally accepted belief.
See, that's what the problem with the Baby-Boomer—first of all, the Baby-Boomer is conditioned, by what? The Baby-Boomer is generally, a white-collar population, or white-collar-oriented population, born between 1946 and 1958. And they were conditioned by a combination of factors; on the one side, the witchhunt, the terror, fear. There was a witchhunt going on. A dictatorship was in place. They were frightened. And the expression of that, as in Europe, was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. You don't have to be afraid—just slightly afraid. You have to go along. Have to go along! There is no truth! Go along! There is no truth, there's only a Consensus. Join the Consensus.
Mother said, to the husband: "Don't get our family into trouble. Shut your mouth, and do as you're told. Our family needs security. Shut your mouth, and do as you're told. Or, I'll divorce you, I'll denounce you!" Hmm? And the kiddies were told the same thing. "Huh? Huh! You create an embarrassment for us?! Huh-huh? At school? You said that, huh? You let them know that we did that, huh?" And that's what they were trained. And they were trained that there is no truth. They're trained that there's only a consensus. And what the effect of that is, is to tell people, that "your mind doesn't mean anything. You may have your own opinion."
You see this in Baby Boomers. You find a typical Baby Boomer, in many cases, you find—well, you get 'em alone, away from their relatives and friends, and family, and then they'd be sane. Once they get back with their family, and friends, and circles, their social circles, they go nuts again! Why? Because they're controlled by the dynamics of a consensus. And to the extent that they're capable of thinking independently, you have to get them away from their friends and neighbors and whatnot. Get them out of their usual circumstances, and just ask them as an individual, what do they really think? "What's your judgment on this? Suppose these guys didn't exist; what would your judgment be?" And you will often get a certain significant percentage of the Baby Boomers, who will actually act under those circumstances, as intelligent people.
But once you get them together, as a consensus, they say, "You can't do that. You gotta learn to get along in this society. You gotta learn to go along! You gotta join in things. Look, you're new in this thing—we are experienced. This is the way things are supposed to work!" And that's how they destroy you. That's how they tried to destroy the youth, by destroying—when they become independent: "C'mon! Don't you know you're not supposed to do that? Don't you know that if you want to get ahead in life, here's what you have to do, hah?
"And your mother is very upset with you! Because you're not doing what you should do. You're not going to get any place, and you're a big disappointment to your mother, I can tell you!" [laughter] That's the Consensus, that's the way it works.
And it took the form of existentialism, which is the dominant ideology of the Baby Boomers. And you meet people in the Congress, and you realize that you're dealing with that. Now, if they're serious, and really want to discuss something with you, just, "C'mon..." But when they think somebody's looking, someone's going to hear what you're saying—"No-no. No-no, no-no, no-no!" Hmm? "No, no. NO!" [laughter]
Breaking Free of the Consensus
So the point is, younger generation people, who want to become leaders, and can become leaders in this way, is by breaking free of the consensus, and understanding reason. And to do that, you have to do two things, which is what I've been emphasizing with the educational program among us, in developing the program. Two things: Physical science, but only from that standpoint. Not from the standpoint of learning the rules, but of discovering the principles. And you have to do the same thing with music. Because music, and particularly with the Bach, and with the choral work, in this case, you actually are forced to look for creativity, and you know that the thing is somehow wrong unless you hit that point, where the magic comes up, as in the Ave Verum Corpus [of Mozart]. Where something happens, an infinitesimal. And you realize that what you've achieved—is that. It's an idea: You've communicated an idea, which you might call transcendental. And that's what the success is. You see a lot of people, performers in music—it's crap. Fine, it's crap. They play the right notes, not too many clinkers. They get by, they follow the school, they're accepted. They're fast enough. They're clear enough, they know the score.
But it stinks. Because there's no creativity. When you have a great composer, there's creativity. You've got to find it, what it is. That takes a lot of work.
Our friend Norbert Brainin, and the way they worked, the Amadeus Quartet—the way they worked, they worked over years! They kept coming back to the composition, to realize what they had failed to do earlier, and what they were now going to do. When they broke up, because of a death, they were in the middle of producing a new casting, an entire casting of the collection of Beethoven String Quartets. And it wasn't done, because there was a lot of opposition to that, to their doing it. But they realized what they had to do, which was quite different than what they had done, that you get in the recorded editions which are available to you, I suppose still today. They understood creativity! It's something they worked at: It was their morality, especially Norbert's morality—it was his morality.
For example, people who knew him, told us things about him; that, when he was a young man in London, that he was spending most of his time on intonation. He would concentrate, his life was consumed by concentrating on precise intonation. And when we were demonstrating that, among other things, the Classical musical literature of the 18th Century was entirely based on Bach, and was based on C-256, and was based on passing on the F#—we demonstrated it. He went down to a laboratory in Italy, where he took his violin, which was a million-dollar violin; and he took it and he performed on it, there, for this test, this physical test about the tuning. And the question was, what is the instrument tuned to? What is the right pitch for the instrument, the way it's built, designed? And these instruments were designed for C-256, and based on a soprano passing on the F#.
This is the natural tuning of the human singing voice. The problem is, that when you get away from that, you lose your access to creativity, because you lose the intention which is there by the composer. And Helga had this event in Milan, with people like [Piero] Cappuccilli, who is probably one of the greatest singers of the past period, a baritone. He's a magnificent singer. And others. And every one of the leading greatest singers of that time, agreed!
But jerks, today, say, "No, you have to have an elevated pitch." And there's no way that you can really succeed, in creative music with an elevated pitch: The universe is tuned! Who are you to change the universe? What do you think you are, God?!
So, the focus on creativity, and the devotion to looking for the motivation that moves the universe, and should move human beings, is the key to getting society out of this mess.
The other way it works, as it works with many of you in field experience: You're confronting a population which is completely disoriented. You're dealing, for example, as many of you deal with members of the U.S. Congress, or their staffs and people like that. And they really don't know what they're doing! You're trying to motivate them to become better than they are, to touch something in them, which for a moment brings out something in them, which is better than they are normally in the course of life. If you don't have it in yourself, you can't bring it out in them. If you're just trying to bring a smart argument, if you're not motivating them, but just trying to give a smart argument, a flimsy proof, you're not going to accomplish anything. You won't get through to them. It's when you get through to that spark of creativity which resides in every human being, and you can reach that, and the joy that they get when they get a sense that they're really doing something creative, is what moves them. They just light up, you see them light up as if they'd been illuminated, or something. Not as an Illuminati, but illuminated nonetheless. And that's the point.
The problem here, is the Times lies. Bad Times. It lies by changing the subject. It says, "Well, China market, this, blah, blah, blah, blah." The system is finished! Their system is finished! The system they've supported, is finished. And they're trying to cling to defend the old system, rather than accept it, what has to be the new. They fail to see themselves as they are. They accept the consensus, rather than reason.
And what we need on this planet, in every country—we don't exclude older people—but what we're looking for, is younger people, preferably over 18, between 18 and 25, and somewhat older: Who still have the capacity to generate within themselves, the ability to evoke that spark of creativity within themselves! Which always takes the form of the infinitesimal. Because it's such young people, the same generation that usually is sent to war, when wars are fought, that are recruited and sent to war: It is that generation, that age-group, which must move society, in the main. You have a few older characters like me, who can make a contribution. But! It's that generation, 18 to 25, 18 to 35, that's the generation that goes to war, that's the generation that has the passion to change: And it's from that generation, that those who have developed the spark of creativity, and are devoted to it, who will move the rest of the population, to get its ass out of bed, and save itself.
